Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
No Pop in the Culture
When I got into the television business in 1983 I pulled into the station parking lot every morning just as the sun began to cast long shadows of our tower across the black asphalt.
I was a broadcaster. Appealing to the largest possible audience was bred into me. Broadcasting with the emphasis on the broad.
Those were still heady days. Three commercial networks and a thriving independent base of stations. There were rumors that Rupert Murdoch was considering a fourth network. Was he out of his mind?
ESPN was barely five. CNN was syndicating half hours of its Headline News channel because it was hard to get clearance on cable systems.
We lived and (mostly) died by the ratings.
Flash forward to today. The talk of the industry are shows that aren’t the talk of the nation. They’ve taken the Pop out of Popular.
Last year in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson observed:
The most essayed-about show might be Girls. The most tweeted-about show is, statistically, Pretty Little Liars. The most talked-about, right now, is House of Cards. But the most popular show (which is barely essayed-about, rarely tweeted-about, and hardly talked-about) is NCIS, whose audience is literally as big as those three other shows—combined … times two.
Or put more succinctly, “The people reading about TV and the people watching TV are living in two separate worlds.”
The divide used to be generational. It’s increasingly becoming something else, more class oriented. Talking about, writing about and reading about what’s on the subscription channels is what counts. If you have anything to say on what’s still being broadcast to the low-brow ignorant masses it had better be disparaging.
On Vulture.com, former GQ Russia editor Michael Idov recalled a meeting of the magazine’s international editors and British editor Dylan Jones lamenting, “Mad Men is such an absolute brand fit for GQ. We have to write about it. We can’t not write about it. If it didn’t exist, we would have to create it. Too bad we can’t make people watch it!”
In How the Media Forced Mad Men Down the World’s Throat, Idov wrote, “For almost eight years now, I have been a proud citizen of a world where Mad Men is the absolute most important show on television. That world uneasily coexists with the real one, where Mad Men is an elegant little bonbon that everyone talked about in 2008. The twist is, we were the “everyone” talking about it then, and we are the ones still talking about it now. We are, God forgive me, the media elite.”
There are 320 million Americans crammed into 110 million homes with television. Netflix and HBO are now in parity with a little over 28 million subscribers each, many of which overlap. Two to three million of those will now get to say what’s culturally relevant.
The rest of us can all go to hell.
Published in Entertainment
EJ,
500 + 500 + 500 + 400 + 62 + 4800 + World Wide Movie Releases = A whole lot of new cinematic content produced every year. Also, there are over 2 million new book titles published every year World Wide.
I go to Amazon if I am interested in reading something specific. Browsing is hyper-fast and easy. They even use AI algorithms to guess what else I might like and respectfully put their guesses at the bottom of the page if I would like to look. I can usually click on the book and read the table of contents and a few pages from the introduction or first chapter. This gives me a very clear indication of what the book covers and the style and tone of the author. I can get it in hard bound, paper back, or kindle. If it’s been in print for a while I can check out the used prices.
This is just me and I am probably not representative of the mass audience but I really don’t have time or patience for random viewing. I would like my cinematic content presented to me like Amazon does books. I’d check out an excerpt of the actual content, not a trailer designed to sell me, and then decide if it’s worth it to me.
The answer to your question is that no I wouldn’t pay for the content you are talking about because I don’t really have much use for it. I don’t subscribe to any cable, satellite, or streaming services now. What I suspect is that I won’t need to. Sooner or later I’ll be able to get the kind of choice that I want at very low price.
When I sold analytical instruments for a living, we had a joke. We did Newtonian Mechanics everyday. When we had a tough job we needed to do some Quantum Mechanics. However, we never quite understood those guys in the front office. They were doing Money Mechanics. You know THE parameter. Those guys must figure out how to make the Money Mechanical equation work in the world that I described. Not because I described it but because it’s liable to come true!
Rob Long please answer the courtesy phone.
Regards,
Jim
James – Nothing in your argument works because it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. What you “want” and what you “suspect” is at odds with economic reality.
You want to compare non-original, non-exclusive and pre-distributive works whose production costs have already been born by traditional means (motion picture houses, dvd sales, network runs) and products whose costs are very minimal (books) to that of original streamed programming.
Without the existence of the original markets, i.e. theaters and over-the-air networks, you will get less product and therefore less choice.
Without the subsidization of cable bundling, and the ability of mega-media to spread promised advertising viewers across platforms, tons of Netflix/Amazon content wouldn’t even exist.
And when you get the awaited call from Rob ask him why he and his partners didn’t continue Sullivan & Son on their own. I mean, they were drawing numbers comparable to Mad Men.
That sounds sketchy… which makes sense if you knew my buddy.
Also, apparently you need a box for each tv, so it will take 4-8 months to make it pay for itself.
But Ill continue to seek any alternative to not have to pay for the hundreds of channels I never watch.
EJ,
Quarks, Leptons, (Heptons: those particles got rhythm) no problem. What’s a debit, credit, asset, liability..huh?
OK OK so maybe I know a little more now but don’t be too sure. Maybe we should ask Rob exactly what you said about Sullivan & Son. His answer would certainly enlighten us as to the state of play of the finance side of a modern TV series (should we call it a TV series anymore?). How many episodes would he sell to the investors and why?
Besides Claire thinks I should go for the mass market in India. Hey..that’s it..Claire in a Bollywood Film!!!…wait..wait…Slum Dog Foreign Minister..that’s it!!! A boy from the Mumbai slums becomes Foreign Minister of India with the help of his beautiful & brilliant American adviser. EJ do you think Claire can dance? They dance a lot in Bollywood films…we’ve got to pitch the pilot to Rob.
..hmmm……$6..no..2$..no $.50 /
ticketdownload x 1.2 billion people = MASSIVE CASH$ FLOWRegards,
Jim
Wrong demographic most likely. Not the people that advertisers were interested in.
I understand where you are coming from regarding the funding of content creation – but the flip side is that cable bundling is not growing, it is shrinking. The dilution of funding is already a problem there too as more and more overly-tailored channels are competing with each other over a shrinking user base. Let’s be honest, there are too many channels now, and the advertising is spread too thin, so I suspect you will see bundling dwindle as a the herd is culled. The way for those channels to survive is to go al la carte, otherwise they will die.
Sullivan and Son (which I never saw as I long ago ditched cable) was crafted for the cable industry, and it failed within those parameters. Whither new content? Well, we’ll see, but it will have to find funding in new ways. I don’t know that it will mean less content and choice, but that the content and choice on smaller budgets. Of course, on cable they are already on smaller budgets. Reality TV is cheap, which is why we have so much of it.
The question then becomes, “What DO you want to watch and how much are you willing to PAY for it?”
Television is now the equivalent of insurance, that is, everybody is subsidizing everyone else.
Boomers grew up believing media was free, all they had to do was watch the ads. Boomer kids thought it was free as long as their parents were paying the bills or it was included in the college tuition.
The reality sucks. They still want it free and now they want it on demand and commercial free!
Or they don’t want it at all, or they are willing to pay for just what they want and no more.
EJ, I am a boomer kid (born in 60’s) and am happy to pay for what I watch. Broadcast laws are antiquated and need reform. There is zero reason I should pay a penny for Korean stations or Lifetime or the hundreds of other stations I never watch. Viewers who enjoy those should foot the bill.
When I go to a restaurant I select what I want from the menu. I don’t have to pay for every item.
A’la carte programming is coming or the cable companies won’t survive.
I’m a child of the boomers and have no use for existing cable structures at all. Rid the cable back in 2008 and haven’t missed it. Rarely go to the cinemas. Would watch some PPV sporting events if ESPN would stream them. Will buy seasons / episodes of shows through Amazon if they are any good, but do not watch them when broadcast.
My youngest sister is a milenial (born 1990). No cable, only buys shows al la carte, pays for a streaming subscription to an anime service, plus a couple of other outlets for shows she likes, and netflix.
Again, apples to oranges. You can’t illegally download a steak and make copies of your potatoes and distribute them to friends. And the cow doesn’t have an agent, either. It’s not like the pig won’t give more bacon without a producer credit.
But what you’re buying is an aftermarket product. In otherwords it wouldn’t exist if the system you despise as being inefficient and costly didn’t exist in the first place.
Sure they will. They own the pipes that your internet is going through.
Oh, and one thing more: If you’re going VOD with no commercials demographics become less relevant. It’s the green of the money not the grey of the hair.
This then becomes a cart / horse issue, and I think assumes too much. If they don’t make content I want, then I won’t buy it. Just goes back to what I was saying earlier – it’s all fragmenting anyway. The reason I don’t buy the bundles right now is because they don’t make content I want. I either pay $80 / month for stacked bundles (local + standard + digital) just to get BBC, which works out to $960 a year just to watch 12 episodes of Top Gear, or I wait and pay $40 to get it on itunes or Amazon. Either way, BBC is still getting same money out of me (assuming they get $3.33 / month of the $80).
Same goes for Big Bang Theory, or any other show I’d watch.
The thing is, if BBC works out that they can still Top Gear to me one way or another, and charge $3.33 per episode, and get enough others doing the same, then they’ll still make it.
Right now TV is sold as a sausage roll with lots of filler. No other industry works that way. I sell discrete products to my customers and every product line had better make money. So I specialize on what I sell.
And this is likely where it is going.
David – You are paying only for the channels you watch. Big picture, sub fees are fungible. Monitor your own viewing, divvy up your bill by channel, and assign $ values. You’re not paying for the Korean station you don’t watch, a Korean-American family watching it all the time covers the penny for you.
Video network packages work for many reasons. One is the subscriber fees, another is the ad revenue. Giving everyone a huge number of channels on the big ad-supported tier results in much incidental viewing of channels you wouldn’t pay to unlock. And some of it sticks. That’s all been planned for a long time.
I used to do cross-channel promotion for a cable MSO back in the 1980’s. We’d swallow the opportunity cost of the ads we didn’t run in order to encourage subscribers to watch more channels, get more value, buy pay channels, sample home shopping, and not churn away. Sometimes this meant selling pays, but sometimes it meant introducing viewers to new programs. We targeted locally, so Midland TX might insert more promos for the HBO original movie Baja Oklahoma, while Phoenix might do a heavy rotation of promos for the Murder, She Wrote reruns starting up on USA Network.
In the future, the more data collected and the better the AI, personally targeted promos and ads may help you derive more value from your package. Packages won’t die easy or soon.
I’m not knocking the digital formats, either. They’re a great complement, especially during summer. Three of my all-time favorite shows just ended, probably forever, Mad Men, Foyle’s War, and Scott & Bailey. I never miss an episode of Blue Bloods and NCIS, both of which are in reruns until the Fall. So it’s time to check out what’s arrived on Amazon, Netflix, and my favorite Roku pay channel, Acorn.TV. Or to fish something out on Roku’s comprehensive search engine, or via their YouTube channel.
This is an era of many choices, even for those of us in an age group where most networks are doing their best to chase us away. Last night we found a great new episode of DCI Banks on a local PBS affiliate. It’s based on a series of books (by an author named Peter Robinson!) about a Yorkshire detective. Terrific mystery. You, too, can be your family’s TV curator.
I’d say more, but it’s time to — EJ, you’ll remember this expression — “warm up the TV” for tonight’s Rangers game seven on NBCSN. Readers who can’t follow a puck may want to watch Carol Reed’s classic The Third Man with Joseph Cotton, coming up at 8PMe on TCM, and enjoy Orson Welles’ classic cuckoo clock speech.